BMW teams with IBM on artificial intelligence car tech

IBM has announced a new collaboration with the BMW Group, through which the companies will work together to explore the role of Watson cognitive computing in personalizing the driving experience and creating more intuitive driver support systems for cars of the future.

As part of the agreement, the BMW Group will collocate a team of researchers at IBM’s global headquarters for Watson Internet of Things (IoT) in Munich, Germany and the companies will work together explore how to improve intelligent assistant functions for drivers.

IBM recently pledged to invest USD $200 million to make its new Munich center one of the world’s most advanced facilities for collaborative innovation as part of a global investment of USD $3 billion to bring Watson cognitive computing to the Internet of Things. BMW, which also has its company headquarters in Bavaria’s capital, is one of the first companies to sign up to be collocated inside IBM’s building within one of the newly-launched industry ‘collaboratories’. A team of BMW Group engineers will work alongside IBM’s own team of technologists, developers and consultants.

To further its automotive research and demonstrate the possibilities of Watson IoT technologies to clients, IBM will locate four BMW i8 sports cars at its Munich Watson IoT HQ. Prototype solutions which will run on IBM’s Bluemix cloud platform will help demonstrate how Watson can enable new conversational interfaces between cars and drivers.

Watson’s machine learning capabilities offer new opportunities for vehicles to learn about the preferences, needs and driving habits of their drivers over time, customizing the driving experience accordingly and improving levels of comfort and safety. The car’s manual will be ingested into Watson so that drivers can ask questions about the vehicle in natural language while still being able to focus on the road. The aim is for the solution to also incorporate data from the Weather Company (an IBM business) as well as realtime, contextual updates about route, traffic and vehicle status in order to enrich the driving experience and make recommendations to the driver.

According to an IBM Institute for Business Value study, “A New Relationship — People and Cars,” vehicles are becoming part of the Internet of Things (IoT) as new mobility options transform consumers’ lives and expectations. Today’s cars are evolving from a mode of transport to a new kind of moving data center with onboard sensors and computers that capture information about the car, its driver, occupants and surroundings. At the same time, conversational interfaces are enabling drivers to interact with their vehicles more naturally and, with machine learning, cars can get to know their drivers better and personalize the experience accordingly.

According to IBM’s studies, cars are increasingly becoming:

1) Self-healing: Vehicles that are able to diagnose and fix themselves and even fix other vehicles with issues without human help.

2) Self-socializing: Vehicles that connect with other vehicles and the world around them.

3) Self-learning: Vehicles with cognitive capability to continuously learn and give advice based on the behavior of the driver, passengers, and other vehicles.